Ethanol is causing food scarcity and hunger: a moral quandary for our lives
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Posted on February 18, 2008
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Population growth, Fossil fuel dependency, Earth spirituality, Renewable fuels
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today form Margaret Swedish:
[WARNING: a longish post]
Visitors to this blog know that we are not big fans of ethanol, and most especially corn ethanol, the favorite of giant US agribusiness and grain farmers. You can put ‘ethanol’ into our search engine and find posts about this with lots of links that provide evidence for our dismay,
Today, an Opinion piece that was picked up in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel caught my eye, Ethanol craze spurs hunger pangs among poor, by David A. Ridenour of the National Center for Public Policy Research in Washington DC. The Center is a conservative think tank, so we have here the merging of concerns between some on the political right with environmental organizations.
Ridenour uses one of our favorite sources, Lester R. Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, also based in DC. His recent research shows that we are causing threats to the food supply around the world, we are causing food scarcity, we are increasing hunger among the world’s poor, we are raising the prices for the most basic foods we eat, with our sharply increased production of ethanol.
And on top of all that, we are doing almost nothing to decrease carbon dioxide emissions or to wean ourselves from foreign oil. As a matter of fact, turns out that ethanol production is a pretty fossil-fuel-intensive industry, as Ridenour points out:
Ethanol is so corrosive that it cannot be transported by pipelines and must be hauled overland in tanker-trucks.
Since the bulk of the ethanol is produced in the heartland and consumed on both coasts, the carbon dioxide emitted by tanker-trucks leaves a carbon footprint which criss-crosses the U.S. tens of thousands of times a day.
So instead of dealing with our fossil fuel/CO2 emissions crises, our taxes are providing subsidies for farmers and agribusiness giants like Archer Daniels Midland to do all these egregious things, and make big profits in the meantime.
Ridenour writes that ethanol:
…is likely to dramatically increase the cases of chronic hunger, malnutrition and starvation in the poverty-stricken nations of Africa and Southeast Asia in the months ahead.
With the prices of some food staples soaring upwards of 40 percent as more farmers plant corn for ethanol rather than human food and animal feed, many environmental groups are raising the specter of global food shortages of apocalyptic proportions.
This, sadly, is what the research shows. We have written about this as a future threat, but Brown’s data shows that it is all here right now.
Brown explains in an article on the EPI’s website, Why Ethanol Production Will Drive World Food Prices Even Higher in 2008.
We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history. The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before. [my emphasis]
The world is facing the most severe food price inflation in history as grain and soybean prices climb to all-time highs…
…it is a matter of demand simply outpacing supply. In seven of the last eight years world grain production has fallen short of consumption. These annual shortfalls have been covered by drawing down grain stocks, but the carryover stocks—the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins—have now dropped to 54 days of world consumption, the lowest on record.
So we are creating here a situation of global food scarcity, even as population growth continues apace. Brown notes that come countries are beginning to restrict grain exports anticipating scarcity, while importers like Japan are building reserves. All of this is driving up prices, which means the price of bread, pasta, tortillas, milk, and the list goes on.
As we consume more than is produced and the bin depletes, we will arrive imminently at a point where there will not be enough grain to feed the world’s people.
When we buy our corn ethanol mix at the gas pump, when we pay farmers to plant more corn and soy for ethanol, when we build more ethanol plants to process the stuff, we are causing more and more people in our world to go hungry, we are creating food scarcity that will likely inflame local instability and bring about increasing numbers of ‘failed states,’ as Brown points out.
If you have a few minutes, don’t miss Brown’s press conference podcast on this issue. Listen with friends, or your faith communities or discussion groups, and then have a conversation about it.
Some points he makes include: right now we have the lowest grain stocks and the highest prices on record, while the US anticipates one of its lowest grain harvests in 2008. For all the suffering and turmoil this is causing and will cause in the future, ethanol only supplies 3 percent of our fuel needs. If all the agricutural land in the US was put into ethanol production, that percentage would rise to only 18 percent.
Hardly worthy of causing hunger and starvation around the world, is it?
He also points out that never before have we paid twice for our food commodities — with our taxes in the form of subsidies, and at the store in the form of higher prices for food.
Are we stupid or what?
We are being sold a bill of goods here in the name of the corporate farm states (Obama comes from one of them, Illinois, which has a booming ethanol busines. Has the industry contributed to his campaign? Hmmmmmm. Think I’ll go find out.).
But more than that, we are being faced here with a major moral and ethical challenge. This blog focuses in large part on this question: what kind of human beings will we be here in this affluent US, and other affluent countries of the world, as we go through this difficult, wrenching transition, as our multiple ecological crises begin to hit us all at once, coming up against lifestyles we assume as our birth rights?
Like it or not, more and more, we are going to be faced with this choice: my affluent lifestyle vs. the lives of hundreds of millions of poor people and the very habitability of the world for the 6.5 billion to 9 billion people that will be on this planet over the next 50 years.
What are we going to do?
Technorati Tags: corn ethanol, ethanol subsidies, ethanol and world hunger, ethanol and carbon dioxide emissions, moral challenge of affluent lifestyles
Photo credit: Decker Electric, Inc., Wichita KS
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